For the last five years, the Greater Wichita Partnership has put together actionable plans to help spur new downtown projects, attract and retain talent, create workforce development programs and invite new companies and jobs to Wichita.
Now the Partnership is developing a new initiative — this one aimed specifically at accelerating entrepreneurship and high-growth startups.
"When we think about economic development, when we think about creation of jobs and creation of wealth, we think about those things coming from three things," said Evan Rosell, the Partnership's vice president of projects. "One would be growing the businesses that we have here, another would be bringing businesses from outside of our community inside to our community, and the third would be creating these businesses from within our community."
Where there's strong entrepreneurship, he added, there's vibrant talent, jobs and qualities of place.
Rosell says there's been promising growth in the last four to five years.
There's the e2e Accelerator, rebranded this year to NXTUS. Christina Long is pushing for more equity and diversity in entrepreneurship through her Create Campaign and Founder's Grove. There's also the new Groover Labs, Network Kansas and Youth Entrepreneurs, and Wichita State University is making strides with its Innovation Campus.
All to say there's potential here to take entrepreneurship even further.
"We've been super encouraged by the growth but we're not satisfied with where we are, we want to continue growing," Rosell said. "We're hungry for more."
So the Partnership has hired a consultant out of Omaha named Tom Chapman, who founded Chapman and Co. in 2016 to help economic development strategies incorporate entrepreneurship.
An entrepreneur himself, Chapman has been tasked with creating a more deliberate, strategic approach to growing an "entrepreneurial ecosystem" in Wichita.
For now, Chapman said listening to entrepreneurs is a key part of the process to identify the gaps in the process.
By the end of the first quarter in 2021, Chapman said he hopes to have some actionable steps for the Greater Wichita Partnership and the region as a whole.
Chapman said highlighting Wichita's entrepreneur success stories is another key part of finding the right resources.
"How to continue to expand the economic development efforts of Wichita is finding entrepreneurs and then telling their stories," Chapman said.
"It helps a community to hear some of the stories that happen before somebody got the proverbial top of the mountain," Rosell added. "Those early days where it's not romantic and it's not particularly glitzy or glamorous, that helps shape even just how we think about this and takes it off of a pedestal in ways that people might say, 'If that's what entrepreneurship is, I can do that.'"
